Several years after we were married, I realized we shared the date with the Feast of the Guardian Angels. Thankfully, nothing is a coincidence for God. It made sense considering all we had survived during the first decade of marriage – several back-to-back pregnancies, a miscarriage, the death of my mom, a fatal car accident with a 30-day stay in the hospital, job losses, career changes, financial stressors, spiritual valleys, and more.

You know that feeling when you’ve just been removed from something for too long that it feels awkward or insurmountable to re-associate with it? If you’ve been gone from the gym for too many months, it’s hard to get back into it. If you’ve been out of touch with a certain friend for too long, it can feel like there is too much to catch up on. If you haven’t cleaned the bathrooms in too many weeks, the task feels extraordinarily more difficult. A relationship with God is not that different.

My gratitude abounds for the God who is kind and merciful, slow to anger, and rich in compassion. Love like His is simply unbelievable as he pardons our sins out of sheer kindness for us, healing us without counting the cost. My own human limitations often make this so hard to comprehend. With this Psalm, I feel the urge to just sit and marvel at His goodness and His compassion. How often do I stop to do this? To ask for nothing and to simply praise Him?

I do not know why it has taken me such a long time to really dive into what the Psalms may mean to me – and to the Church, but this past June when I was on a retreat and assigned Psalm 139, it was as if everything changed for me. I prayed with that Psalm every single morning for the rest of the summer and have continued to return to it over the past few weeks. I also discovered that my Bible’s introduction to the Psalms concludes with, “They not only provide us with models to follow, but inspire us to voice our deepest feelings and aspirations.” Simply put, I fell in love with the fact that all of humanity is found in the Psalms.

If you know me, you know that I am often cleaning, organizing, or purging something. If it’s not the fridge, the closets, the floors, or the school files, I am wiping walls, organizing cabinets, or finding another space in our home that needs attention. When my physical space is messy, I cannot function. My anxiety grows, confusion ensues, and everything feels out of control when, in reality, a few things just need to be picked up or sorted. To be honest, it’s both a blessing and a curse. I’ve always wanted to be the mom who leaves the mess for the sake of the memories. It is not that way in our home.

I have always taught my students that nothing God does in our physical world is separate from our spiritual world, and vice versa. It makes me consider that holiness, therefore happiness, may be found in the being without – both physically and spiritually. We teach that God, the sole creator, created everything ex nihilo. He created being where there was none. Could it be true that He does His best work in the nothingness?